About Me

Friday, May 21, 2010

I really, really do not enjoy messing around with XS. Being that it is this weird "smerge" of perl and C. I have a few books on the subject, and even after reading them all, and reading examples, and reading tutorials on the web, I still can't seem to ever get it all right. I know that these things come with time, and what XS accomplishes isn't exactly simple stuff, so I should be happy I'm not hand coding it in assembly or whatever.

But ctypes, ::sigh:: those guys in the python world hold that damn library over my head like hammer. Any time I talk about how awesome Perl is, they bring up the drudgery and over-complexity that XS brings to the table when it's time to interface with other languages (while maintaining performance).

I am very thankful for GSoC, and for Ryan Jendoubi and Reini Urban. Good luck gentlemen! If I can help test, or write documentation or something, let me know. (it would probably be best if I stayed out of the code on this one).

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

1. What an awesome website. It looks great, is totally functional, and gets to the point quickly.2. Simple and easy installer.3. I'm so used to typing #!/usr/bin/perl .. Might take a while to get used to it's full pathname.4. As much as I have loved ActiveState Perl over the years when coding on Windows, I feel a lot more at home with Strawberry. It feels like someone who knows Perl and Unix, and dealt with Perl using Cygwin decided to just build something better altogether. This is basically what happened.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Yeah, the ironman thing was a post a week. I haven't posted in nearly a year. I suck. Since my last post, I have changed jobs, moved to Chicago, and I wrote my own templating system (don't cheer all at once ;-) .. )

Anyway, it's called Ravenel. It's a weird hybrid between a bunch of different templating systems I've used over the years, and I honestly really like what I've made. I'll post some more in depth examples here real soon.

In other news. I just signed up to attend the YAPC::NA conference that will be taking place in Columbus Ohio. If anyone out there is in Chicago, and needs a ride, let me know, as I'll be driving down Sunday, and returning around noon on Wednesday. Should be awesome.

Can't wait to see Rakudo Star. Best wishes to PM and his family.

Lastly, a new version of Perl 5! I wonder how long it will take for us to see this used in distributions?